Critiquing Climate Change Metaphors through Play

In response to continued inaction by governments and corporations in the face of the climate crisis, there is a growing call to find “new” metaphors to live by (Larson 2011; Stibbe 2017). There is now a significant body of corpus work (e.g. Deignan 2017) and, to a lesser extent, experimental work (e.g. Flusberg et al. 2017) looking to identify and critique the use of metaphor in climate discourses. However, applications of this work remain limited, which in turn restricts the perspectives represented in the search for and development of “new” metaphors to live by.

Rather than leaving this search to academics alone, we seek to cultivate pedagogical practices that empower students (broadly construed) to identify and critique metaphors for themselves. Using a game-based learning approach (e.g. Katual et al. 2023), our current project does this through a flexible and accessible card game aimed at increasing criticality and creativity in the use of metaphoric language around the climate crisis. The card deck consists of target cards which specify elements of the climate crisis, including effects (e.g. “extreme weather”), causes (e.g. “fossil fuel use”), participants (e.g. “national governments”), and proposed solutions (e.g. “rewilding”, “carbon capture”). Source cards then specify particular elements within six source domains, chosen based on existing literature (e.g. Augé 2022) and our own corpus work – HEALTH, JOURNEY, COMBAT, COMPETITION, COMMUNITY, and MYTH – and provide a brief definition (e.g. “HEALTH: vaccine: a medical treatment used to protect an individual against a particular disease”). Players can choose between competitive or cooperative gameplay. The competitive rules aim to exercise criticality through debate, as players must offer a source card for each target card and defend their choice. The cooperative rules aim to increase creativity and ‘systems thinking’ by giving players the task of organizing elements of the target deck into a systemic metaphor (Thibodeau et al. 2016) using a single source domain card set.

We argue that games such as this can help to democratize climate discourse by empowering more voices to contribute to meaning-making processes. By increasing meta-communicative awareness of metaphor use and metaphoric reasoning, students become better equipped to engage in creative conversation of the climate crisis and their role within it. Additionally, this approach can be useful in countering misunderstandings that can arise from the uncritical uptake of metaphors in educational settings (e.g. Deingan et al. 2019; Nisbert & Gropengiesser 2013).